Blackberry is a great product and really useful. But I think that Yahoo!'s future is going to be rooted in mobile apps. And we know that we need to have apps on some of the core platforms, and so iOS and Android, probably the two most important platforms for us.
I think a lot of the time there isn't such a black-and-white difference between what's a platform and what's an app. It's really just like the most important apps become platforms.
At Imgur, we need a solid product that works on various platforms, so we're looking at iOS, Android, front end, back end, and devops.
Do I really want to do a mobile game that's one of 300,000, where discoverability is everything? You really have to have a little more sizzle on the steak. I would rather be one of 100 apps for Google Glass than one of 300,000 for iOS and Android.
When I'm introspective about the last few years I think the biggest mistake that we made, as a company, is betting too much on HTML5 as opposed to native... because it just wasn't there. And it's not that HTML5 is bad. I'm actually, on long-term, really excited about it. One of the things that's interesting is we actually have more people on a daily basis using mobile Web Facebook than we have using our iOS or Android apps combined. So mobile Web is a big thing for us.
There may be 300,000 apps for the iPhone and iPad, but the only app you really need is the browser. You don't need an app for the web ... You don't need to go through some kind of SDK ... You can use your web tools ... And you can publish your apps to the BlackBerry without writing any native code.
Though the S8, like all premium Samsung phones, runs Android with the basic Google suite of apps, Samsung keeps trying to duplicate Android functions with its own software. It wants to be a software platform like its rival Apple, but it uses someone else's operating system and core apps. Awkward.
When it comes to the mobile web, the technology industry seems to be split between two camps - native apps and HTML5 web-based apps.
Microsoft makes numerous apps for both Android and iOS, as do Google, Amazon and Facebook. You can run iTunes and iCloud on Windows and Office on the Mac.
We've been happy to be able to work with Sony and Microsoft to have the first game that honors everyone's purchases across iOS, Android, PC, Mac, and the console platforms.
There are a lot of apps that are fun to use - they're utility apps; they're fine. But there are a fraction of apps that are in the cream of the crop. You just need to be in the cream of the crop to get noticed.
The growing role of enterprise social media, plus the growing budgets and authority of CMOs entrusted with choosing the best platforms, translates into an exciting future for apps that harness social potential for large companies.
If you buy the Chromebook Plus and intend to use it mainly as a Chromebook, I expect you'll have a good experience. But if you plan to rely heavily on Android apps, you're basically buying into the start of a journey, replete with odd-looking presentations of familiar apps, bugs and crashes.
On mobile, what are the core apps? It's basically messaging, mapping and review data.
Overall, there isn't much difference between a high-end Android and iOS phone, despite the fact that Android is a knockoff of iOS.
Google+ was, to my mind, all about creating a first-party data connection between Google most important services - search, mail, YouTube, Android/Play, and apps.
One of the really fascinating areas is marketplaces that take advantage of mobile devices. Ridesharing is the obvious example, but that's just the start of it, of selling goods and services with lightweight mobile apps.